Drugged drink

the water in our taps may be contaminated with drugs that are as bad as pesticides. And guess how they get into drinking water? Most of the drugs we consume are excreted through urine. "Between 30 to 90 per cent of an administered dose of antibiotics to humans and animals is excreted with the urine,' says Bent Halling-Sorensen of the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy in Denmark.

The urine goes into the sewage and from there to the rivers. The water contaminated with drugs can also leak from the waste tips and sewage sludge into groundwater sources. "Drugs are one of the few groups of chemicals in water that we do not monitor,' said Steve Killeen, who is in charge of uk' s Environmental Agency. "A lot of work has been done on pesticides. But even though pharmaceuticals can be present in water at similar levels, and even though they are biologically active, they have previously been ignored,' said Killeen. While looking for pesticides in Swiss lakes, Hans-Rudolf Buser of the Swiss Federal Research Station in W